I'm not big on CEO worship. There are a few people that I give tremendous credit to for changing the world for the better while also making bucket loads of money. Stephen Wolfram is probably at the top of my list. His ideas are audacious and inspiring.
“Just as we curate knowledge, we also curate APIs, devices, and digital information,” says Wolfram. “So just as we know things about Ecuador, we also know things about the Twitter API – just as you get the population of Ecuador, you can learn something about the Twitter API.”
I think the bit about sentient code at the end of the article is a sad conclusion but the other concepts are inspiring. He's trying to develop a smart language for integrating contextual understanding in even the most basic programs running on Raspberry Pi.
People who are building web apps, Wolfram says, will likely use the Wolfram cloud to make that happen. But there will be private cloud solutions as well. Developers who are building mobile apps will be able to get an embedded version of the Wolfram engine, and then use an API to get whatever data you need. All code, however, can simply be copied and pasted between cloud and device and desktop — it’s all the same.
Terry Cavanagh's endlessly vexing action game Super Hexagon travels back a few decades for its latest port, arriving mostly intact on the Commodore 64 via the fan-made tribute Micro Hexagon.
Homebrew enthusiasts Paul Koller and Mikkel Hastrup created 8-bit version of Super Hexagon as part of this year's RGCD C64 Cartridge Development Competition, following up on Koller's previous C64 ports of Super Crate Box and Canabalt. It's an impressive piece of work considering the hardware (dig that rotation effect!), and comes complete with a SID rendition of the original game's thumping soundtrack.
Micro Hexagon is available as a free download, and is playable on emulators and original C64 hardware.
1) The University of Washington always being so quick to figure this out CONFIRMS that the dude in their seismology department is constantly just tracking this stuff with the game on.
2) I know West Coast = tectonic plates = earthquakes = seismographs needed, but can't we get more seismographs near NFL stadiums? I want to know which fanbase has the most/fattest/most excited fans, much as Guinness has tracked decibels.
3) YES I ONLY WANTED TO DO THIS POST SO I COULD INCLUDE THE BEGINNING OF THE STRAIGHT-TO-DVD EARTHQUAKE MOVIE 10.5: APOCALYPSE
WATCH OUT! IF YOU DON'T BIKE FASTER THE SPACE NEEDLE WILL FALL ON YOU, RADICAL BIKE GUY WHO WEARS A LOT OF PROTECTIVE GEAR FOR A RADICAL BIKE GUY!
San Francisco is reaching out to gays who are homeless, after a survey found nearly 30 percent of the city’s homeless population identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.
"It should be a league rule saying that a defender can not tackle a player by his penis," Davis wrote in a since deleted tweet. "The most painful thing ever!"
“Spike Away” is the ingenious creation by industrial designer Siew Ming Cheng made during a workshop given by the award winning furniture designer Werner Aisslinger at the National University of Singapore. Students in the workshop were to come up with a problem for which they could hack a solution using ordinary objects, no matter how strange the results, per the art of Chindogu. In this case, it was how to protect one’s personal space on the crowded subway.
A quick brainstorming leads to a everyday situation. Trains are usually crowded during peak hours. Everybody will push each other to try and get onto the train. How can I protect my personal space? The idea was then conceived. “What if I wear a vest that is full of spikes?”
The vest is made of a lattice of flexible spiky plastic material tied together with cable ties. It’s the perfect accessory to warn people that you’re feeling a little prickly.
"Icelandic police shot dead a man who refused to stop firing at them with a shotgun in the capital of Reykjavik earlier today -- and then they apologized. It was the first time that anyone in the country was killed by police gunfire."
If you ever wanted to tell Mr. Darcy to take a long walk off a short cliff, here's your chance. Ever, Jane,an MMO based in Jane Austen's universe, has been successfully funded, closing with $109,563 of a requested $100,000 on Kickstarter.
In Ever, Jane, the main weapon is gossip; players will live and die by how the strict social hierarchy perceives their actions. The game includes traditional RPG stats such as strength, dexterity and intelligence, and a party invitation system allows players to alter their reputations. If a person of a higher status accepts your invitation, your status goes up, but whether it was accepted out of duty or happiness determines how much of a boost you'll get. If the invitation is rejected, your status drops. It sounds like a lot of smack talk, manipulation and false flattery. Ah, high school.
The prototype is available to download now for PC and Mac, free for at least another two weeks while developer 3 Turn Productions wraps up Kickstarter things. The studio is headed up by Judy Tyrer, former Lead Engineer at Sony Online Entertainment and Senior Engineering Manager at Linden Labs, where she worked on Second Life. Ever, Jane is 3 Turn's first attempt at turning historically accurate, literary worlds into digital reality.
SAN FRANCISCO—After a quick yet confident once-over that unfortunately caught none of the rampant spelling errors, clunky prose, and overly casual language throughout his cover letter and résumé, job hopeful Mark Lopez hit “send...
NEW YORK—In a riveting, if slightly far-fetched, work of alternate history that fans of science fiction are bound to enjoy, author Judith Nies’ novel Native American History: A Chronology Of The Vast Achievements Of A Culture And Their Link...
Making conversation at Thanksgiving can be hard, but apparently it's especially hard if you're an employee of the National Security Agency. So the agency has stepped in to solve the problem, issuing this list of approved talking points for fending off hostile relatives, unearthed by reporter Kevin Gosztola. If an NSA staffer was confronted by a privacy-minded relative over the long weekend, the document would keep them from being caught at a loss for words.
The document does not mention leaker Edward Snowden, instead focusing on the agency's military ties, broad oversight, and track record in the fight against terrorism. One bullet point claims the NSA has foiled 54 terrorist attacks globally since 9/11, although these figures have been disputed. Another passage emphasizes the agency's commitment to transparency and popular approval, despite the vast number of secret programs which have recently come to light. "We encourage the American public to work with us to define the way ahead in balancing transparency and national security," the document reads. "We embrace public dialogue."
Cyber Monday was supposed to be a big day for Motorola. The company promised to offer consumers its flagship Moto X handset at just $349 off-contract for a limited time starting at 8AM CST (9AM EST) this morning. But thus far, Motorola has been unable to make good on its attractive offer. Motorola's website began experiencing downtime and other significant reliability problems as the on-sale time approached, forcing the company to stop accepting orders via its Moto Maker web tool. Unfortunately, five hours later, Motorola has done relatively little to keep customers informed of when things will be back up and running. At around 10AM EST, the company first admitted it was experiencing problems.
About an hour later, Motorola provided another update saying that "online services" are currently being restored. "Cyber Monday sales won't begin until all systems are a go," the company has promised. But its potential customers are none too pleased about the delays. Seemingly adding to the frustration is that Motorola has been tweeting to promote upcoming events with Wired, even as Cyber Monday shoppers remain in the dark on a fantastic (and likely extremely limited) deal.
We've reached out to Motorola for more details on when today's Moto X sale will go live.
Kotaku: "Marius, as many game protagonists before him, watches his family die. Naturally this angers him and he wants to seek revenge—but then later on, this lady explains to him why exactly his father was killed. It's supposed to be an emotional scene, but damn, I'll be honest, the only thing I could focus on while the scene unfolds is how oddly the breasts are moving—you can see what I mean at around 1:30." and/or http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/1986ca1vpuedvgif/ku-xlarge.gif
'The Personal Genome Service isn’t primarily intended to be a medical device. It is a mechanism meant to be a front end for a massive information-gathering operation against an unwitting public. ... What the search engine is to Google, the Personal Genome Service is to 23andMe. The company is not exactly hiding its ambitions. “The long game here is not to make money selling kits, although the kits are essential to get the base level data,” Patrick Chung, a 23andMe board member, told FastCompany last month. “Once you have the data, [the company] does actually become the Google of personalized health care.” The company has lowered the price of the kit again and again, most recently from $299 to a mere $99, practically making it a stocking-stuffer. All the better to induce volunteers to give 23andMe the data it so desperately wants. (Currently, the database contains the genetic information of some half a million people, a number Wojcicki reportedly wants to double by year end.)'
SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. If there’s a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it. Last Friday the U.S. Food and Drug…
The design was trialled over the past year at a hospital in London and another in Southampton, and PearsonLloyd director Tom Lloyd told Dezeen the results have been overwhelmingly positive: "We were shocked by the fact that there was a 50 percent reduction in the aggressive incidents across the two hospitals after the implementation."
Photograph by Simon Turner
"For some reason A&E is a space where people feel like they have the right to get angry and start shouting," said Lloyd. "We thought that by trying to calm the space down and take that away there would be less likelihood of violent incidents."
Photograph by Simon Turner
In response to a brief from the Design Council and the Department of Health, PearsonLloyd assembled a multidisciplinary team including psychoanalysts, service designers, A&E consultants and social scientists to identify the main reasons why patients become agitated enough to physically or verbally abuse hospital staff.
"A lot of the frustration that leads to anger is just a lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding about how things work," explained Lloyd. "It's caused by patients not understanding the clinical language or the process or why someone who arrives after them is seen before them."
The proposed solution focuses on placing key information in relevant locations within the waiting room and consultation areas so patients are constantly aware of where they are and how long each part of the process might take.
A process map in the waiting room guides patients arriving at A&E through the process, from check-in to assessment, treatment and next steps, and is supplemented by a leaflet with more details.
Vertical panels throughout the department explain the activities that take place in each space and their consistent appearance makes them easily identifiable.
Live information about how busy the department is and predicted waiting times for different assessments are displayed on monitors and the designers have proposed a mobile app that could direct patients to the nearest A&E with the shortest waiting times.
"It's about providing information and it sounds so simple but we wanted to create something that was cheap because if we'd designed the perfect waiting room, with great chairs and great lighting, then the chances of that being able to be rolled out in any hospital was next to zero," explained Lloyd.
"We wanted a system that could be retrofitted at very low cost and quite high speed in almost any department in the country."
The second part of the proposal is a programme that encourages staff to record instances of abuse on a purpose-designed chart so these can be communicated to management and trends identified that could facilitate procedural changes.
"For example, you imagine it's drunk men on a Friday night who cause most of the problems, whereas it might actually be other people for perfectly legitimate reasons being confused by the system," explained Lloyd.
PearsonLloyd also developed a set of guidelines that enable the system to be implemented in any existing hospital and provide advice for architects and interior designers developing new healthcare facilities.
As if recent renewed debate about its ending weren’t enough to demonstrate that, after 25 years, Batman: The Killing Joke can still spur discussion, now new original artwork has surfaced indicating the scene depicting the torture of Barbara Gordon was initially far more graphic and sexualized. A photo of the inked page (below, definitely NSFW) [...]
notable: the misogynist HeroQuest 25th Anniversary Kickstarter got shitcanned, and not even by Hasbro or Games Workshop
Paul: December arrives, and with it comes a large, old man dressed in red, banging on my door after midnight with one leather-gloved fist while another tightly clutches a ragged cloth sack that smells of old skin. The crazy hours I keep means I can't begin to claim was anywhere near asleep, but as I hold open the door to let in the moonlight, the winter air and the sight of his craggy, crumpled face, I sourly ask him what he wants and what's in the bag.
He strikes me across the bridge of the nose with the butt of a concealed weapon. "GAMES NEWS," he bellows, his voice heavy with rum. I wake up tied to a chair in my living room. The man rants as he paces back and forth, my head throbbing in time with every syllable.
Computer scientists have developed a malware prototype that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection.
The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an "air gap" between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals.
Two weeks ago, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD produced an Asgardian-themed Thor: The Dark World tie in episode in which a character mused that if the Asgardian gods had turned out to be real aliens, whether other belief systems might also have extraterrestrial origin, adding "Vishnu for sure, right?" While I myself wasn't certain whether I'd forgotten some relevant detail about Hinduism since my middle school days that would make that a cleverer joke or the creators merely picked a deity name out of a hat, the Universal Society of Hinduism takes issue with the insinuation.
The Oregon Department of Agriculture is restricting the use of two pesticide ingredients implicated in the deaths of more than 50,000 bumble bees earlier this year.
The restrictions apply to the pesticide ingredients dinotefuran and imidicloprid. Officials say they believe those ingredients – when sprayed on trees that have their own natural toxicity – become fatally toxic to bees and other pollinators.
To prevent more bee kills, Oregon is prohibiting the use of products containing those two ingredients on linden trees, basswood and other Tilia species that have similar natural toxins. The products will have to be labeled with the restriction before they can be sold in Oregon.
Oregon the first state to take such a step, according to Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney. His agency is also asking the Environmental Protection Agency to consider similar restrictions nationwide.
Sequential Pacific Biodiesel – a company with cooking oil drop sites all over Oregon – is teaming up with Portland grocer New Seasons next week to make it easier to recycle used Thanksgiving turkey fry oil.
Oil dropped off at three New Seasons locations on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving will be picked up by Sequential and turned into biodiesel.
